Society

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Ukraine’s new strategy hits Russia where it hurts

Ukraine is fighting not one but two hot wars against Russia. The first, a conventional, bloody land war along an 810-mile front line, has descended into stalemate. But the second – drone and missile strikes and sabotage raids deep into enemy territory – may prove to be a game-changing strategy for hitting Russia where it hurts. Last week, two Ukrainian kamikaze drones scored a spectacular hit on an oil and gas refinery and an oil export terminal in Ust-Luga near St Petersburg. At a range of 775 miles from Ukraine, the strike has severely dented Russian ability to produce and export naphtha, jet fuel and gasoil, and export liquefied natural

The Spectator

Could Nikki Haley become the first female US president? 

Madame president If Donald Trump stumbles before election day, could Nikki Haley end up becoming the first female US president? Hillary Clinton failed as the first female presidential candidate in 2016, but she wasn’t the first to stand on a presidential ticket: that honour belongs to the now-forgotten Geraldine A. Ferraro, who was picked by Walter Mondale to be his Democratic running mate in the 1984 election. Mondale had hoped to win over women voters, but his tactic appeared to backfire when a poll soon after her selection showed only 22 per cent of women voters approved of Mondale’s choice and three in five of all voters believed he had

Ross Clark Ross Clark

How to pass Harvard’s unconscious bias exam

Like Prince Harry, I never knew I had unconscious bias until it was pointed out to me, but now it has been I know I will have to do something about it. Except that in my case that ‘something’ is not to moan to Oprah Winfrey about members of my family speculating on the colour of my baby’s skin. It is to dig a little deeper and ask: do I really have an inner Ku Klux Klan that is controlling all I do and preventing me from becoming a good person? I had heard of unconscious bias training on many occasions – not least when the then Cabinet Office minister

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Everyone should eat venison

Well, lucky little tiny tots at Top Days nurseries in Hampshire and Dorset. It’s Bambi on the menu for them now that the organisation running the schools has teamed up with the Eat Wild company, which promotes wild meats, to introduce venison into school lunches. They’re rolling out five dishes featuring venison, including deer mince in spaghetti bolognese and burgers. Some 3,000 children will benefit, and there will be more when the scheme is introduced in other schools. It is the obvious and sane solution to the problem of an ever-increasing deer population, short of introducing wolves to cull the creatures, which nowadays have no natural predators. The children get

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

‘The perfect winter snack’: how to make flammekueche

There are times in the year that call for snacks. Rather than embracing the various diets and other forms of self-flagellation that sweep over us at the start of the year, we need every joy we can get during endless January, with its dark, short days and cold nights. Right now, we are in such territory. Open those posh crisps, order the triple-cooked chips, invite joy in. I have strong ideas about the platonic snack for winter: something hot, ideally, to accompany a glass of something cold as you while away the dark evenings. The ideal contrast between crisp and yielding, sweet and salty – something that can be picked

Toby Young Toby Young

Anti-vaxxers aren’t to blame for rising measles cases

The UK Health Security Agency is sufficiently concerned about the growing number of measles cases in the West Midlands that it declared a ‘national incident’ last week. According to official figures, there have been 216 confirmed and 103 probable measles cases in the region since last October. The cause? The uptake of the MMR vaccine is at its lowest level in more than a decade, according to Dame Jenny Harries, CEO of the UKHSA. For some, this is proof of the ‘harm’ that anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists can do if greater efforts aren’t made to silence them. A leading article in the Times blamed the outbreak on ‘disease disinformation’, accusing

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Football needs its own Mr Bates

Did football officials watch Mr Bates vs The Post Office? They should have – and learned from it. Otherwise they could be next in the crosshairs of a TV dramatist. Just as the Post Office failed to act as they should have done to protect sub-postmasters, football – and rugby for that matter – is showing no noticeable signs of urgency to look after its players despite growing evidence that both sports are contributing to long-term brain damage. Day after day we see young men heading the ball with an indifference that gives you a headache just to watch A debate in parliament on the issue last September which referred

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I check my friends have bought my book? 

Q. I am executor of a deceased bachelor whose will is clear that I should distribute his estate to his long-standing friends. There is no mention of what to do with family photos and heirlooms, which have little market value, but he hung on to them for sentimental reasons. I had thought to offer them to his two surviving blood relatives who are second cousins (and siblings to one another) and who, apart from a small pecuniary legacy, get nothing. Unfortunately, these relatives don’t talk to each other and cannot agree to fair shares each. What should I do? – D.L., Newcastle-under-Lyme A. Issue a photographic inventory of the sentimental

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

‘I pity MPs more than ever’: the Cinnamon Club, reviewed

The Cinnamon Club appears on lists of MPs favourite restaurants: if they can still eat this late into a parliament. It lives in the old Westminster Library on Great Smith Street, a curiously bloodless part of London, and an irresistible metaphor wherever you are. When once you ate knowledge, you now eat flesh, but only if you can afford it. Now there is the Charing Cross Library, which lives next to the Garrick Theatre, and looks curiously oppressed. Perhaps soon it will be a falafel shack and knows it. There is also the Central Reference Library, which could be a KFC, and soon will be. Public spaces are shrinking. They

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The pure joy of grandchildren

‘My grandchildren are my world,’ writes a woman on social media, summing up a certain type of grandparent. There are, however, two ways of looking at it and I see many whose worlds revolve around their grandchildren because they have no choice. I used to chat with them at the school gate. If their families were not strictly ‘the rural poor’, they were certainly of the group Theresa May described as ‘just about managing’: both parents had to work and grandparents took up the slack, unless they were still of working age, in which case arrangements were more haphazard. I see many whose worlds revolve around their grandchildren because they

Dot Wordsworth

What’s in a place name?

There is a place in Westmorland called Wordsworth’s Well, but I must tell you that it is not named after me. A field in Westmorland is called Wordy Dolt, and I am glad to tell you that it is not named after me either. Here wordy (like –worthy elsewhere) means ‘enclosure’, not ‘voluble’ nor indeed ‘valuable’, and dolt means ‘share of the common field’, not ‘idiot’. I discovered this from the glorious English Place-Name Society. I call it glorious because it has been going for 100 years and is still pegging away at a survey recording and analysing historically all the place-names of England. So far 91 volumes have been

Melissa Kite

Have I cursed myself by drinking holy water?

The mountain spring that feeds our house froze during the first ground frost, and we had no water. The builder boyfriend filled a bucket from the fountain in the garden so we could flush the loo. This really is living in faded grandeur. I spent the evening worrying about how we had cursed ourselves by drinking and bathing in holy water We are waiting on various tradesmen to turn up and do things to the plumbing in our run-down Georgian pile. We know we might have to drop a bore hole. But until then the water coming out of our taps is from a ‘holy well’. The stream pools into

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 27 January 2024

The London Teams of Four was the first bridge tournament of the new year and was a very close affair. Kevin Castner finally prevailed against the opposition with his team of (partner) Phil King and teammates Sebastian Atisen and Stefano Tommasini – the last newly selected, with his regular partner Ben Norton, to represent England in the Open Teams in the European Championships later this year. Today’s hand features fierce bidding and even fiercer declarer play by Capt Kevin, who pulled off the hand of the day. Take a look at this beauty. Phil King’s 6♦️ may seem a bit of a stretch, but when 1♦️ was known to show

Luke McShane

The Candidates line up

Lobbing brickbats at Fide, the International Chess Federation, is always in fashion. The organisation celebrates its centenary this year, but Russia’s top player Nepomniachtchi tweeted a bitter New Year greeting: ‘Let 2024 bring Fide everything that it lacks: transparency, integrity, clear rules, unified standards, wise judges, attentive organisers, recognisable sponsors!’ To that litany of gripes, one could add that a democratic deficit is woven into the fabric of the organisation. Member countries, no matter how few constituent players they have, each get one vote, which inevitably distorts the incentives at election time. Fide’s current president, Arkady Dvorkovich, is a former deputy prime minister of Russia, which is ‘problematic’, as the

Luke McShane

No. 785

White to play. Blübaum-Pavlidis, Bundesliga 2024. Which move won the game for Blübaum? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 29 January. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postaladdress and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Re8! Rxe8 (or 1…Nxe8 2 f8=Q+) 2 Qxf6+!! Black resigned since Rxf6 3 fxe8=N+! Kg6 4 Nxc7 wins Last week’s winner Martin Dlouhý, Meziboří, Czech Republic

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Liz Truss follows the Yellow Brick Road

In Competition No. 3333 you were invited to submit a short story that features Donald Trump or another politician of your choice in a well-known fictional landscape. Joan Didion once observed that Ronald Reagan was the American politician to most fully embrace his own fictionality, making up stories in which he played the starring role. Didion put this down to ‘his tendency to see the presidency as a script waiting to be solved’. Needless to say, Reagan didn’t play a starring role in the entry; a medium-sized but impressive postbag was dominated by Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Competitors who shone included Sue Pickard, Nicholas Hodgson and Nigel Bennetton. The prize

Lavatch

2638: Capital fellow

Unclued lights (including one pair giving a name, and one of three words from a quotation) form three groups; the word that links them all must be highlighted in the grid.         Across    1    Make bourgeois rogue grin, yet to embrace female (8)    8    Small cover for head or neck (4) 11    A sailor pockets peso with original value (2,3) 14    Old Yemeni’s brief month in Israel (5) 15    Some poetry’s mood extremely humane (7) 17    Expert delaying old emperor (4) 18    Politician blocks great excuse (5) 19    A relative pens book having no life (7) 23    Fish in benign border of greenery (4,4) 24    Shearwater bird eats

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sturgeon’s missing WhatsApps and Trump’s latest victory 

Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that, in taking part in a second American air attack on Houthi positions near Sanaa, Britain had ‘acted in line with international law, in self defence, and in response to an immediate threat’. This time the leader of the opposition had not been informed before the attack. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, said: ‘We back this targeted action.’ Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, the Foreign Secretary, set off to visit the Middle East. The Commons Procedure Committee decided to recommend that the Foreign Secretary should in general answer questions in the Commons by being summoned to the Bar of the